"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

red spot where the fuse went. It was fun!
I enjoyed radios. I started with a crystal set that I bought at the
store, and I used to listen to it at night in bed while I was going to
sleep, through a pair of earphones. When my mother and father went out until
late at night, they would come into my room and take the earphones off -
and worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep.
About that time I invented a burglar alarm, which was a very
simple-minded thing: it was just a big battery and a bell connected with
some wire. When the door to my room opened, it pushed the wire against the
battery and closed the circuit, and the bell would go off.
One night my mother and father came home from a night out and very,
very quietly, so as not to disturb the child, opened the door to come into
my room to take my earphones off. All of a sudden this tremendous bell went
off with a helluva racket - BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!! I jumped out of bed
yelling, "It worked! It worked!"
I had a Ford coil - a spark coil from an automobile - and I had the
spark terminals at the top of my switchboard. I would put a Raytheon RH
tube, which had argon gas in it, across the terminals, and the spark would
make a purple glow inside the vacuum - it was just great!
One day I was playing with the Ford coil, punching holes in paper with
the sparks, and the paper caught on fire. Soon I couldn't hold it any more
because it was burning near my fingers, so I dropped it in a metal
wastebasket which had a lot of newspapers in it. Newspapers burn fast, you
know, and the flame looked pretty big inside the room. I shut the door so my
mother - who was playing bridge with some friends in the living room -
wouldn't find out there was a fire in my room, took a magazine that was
lying nearby, and put it over the wastebasket to smother the fire.
After the fire was out I took the magazine off, but now the room began
to fill up with smoke. The wastebasket was still too hot to handle, so I got
a pair of pliers, carried it across the room, and held it out the window for
the smoke to blow out.
But because it was breezy outside, the wind lit the fire again, and now
the magazine was out of reach. So I pulled the flaming wastebasket back in
through the window to get the magazine, and I noticed there were curtains in
the window - it was very dangerous!
Well, I got the magazine, put the fire out again, and this time kept
the magazine with me while I shook the glowing coals out of the wastepaper
basket onto the street, two or three floors below. Then I went out of my
room, closed the door behind me, and said to my mother, "I'm going out to
play," and the smoke went out slowly through the windows. I also did some
things with electric motors and built an amplifier for a photo cell that I
bought that could make a bell ring when I put my hand in front of the cell.
I didn't get to do as much as I wanted to, because my mother kept putting me
out all the time, to play. But I was often in the house, fiddling with my
lab.
I bought radios at rummage sales. I didn't have any money, but it
wasn't very expensive - they were old, broken radios, and I'd buy them and
try to fix them. Usually they were broken in some simple-minded way - some
obvious wire was hanging loose, or a coil was broken or partly unwound - so
I could get some of them going. On one of these radios one night I got WACO